Bad Candy is probably the original candy-themed website. I stumbled on it
in about 1997, in college, when there were about ten websites in existence
and every one of them was shiny and new to me. It was up there with the
site that had hundreds of recipes for what you can do with Top Ramen.
(Which I printed out and cherished for many years... but that is another
story.)

Bad Candy believed in candy experimentation. They would buy and eat things
that looked entirely inedible. Tablets that make your milk fizzy and blue.
Rock-hard plum chunks bathed in salt. Circus Peanuts. And then they would
write hilariously rude and disgusting things about each rudely disgusting
product. Sometimes they would dress up like teletubbies and things while
doing it. Oh, it was wonderful.

And then years passed, during which I
forgot that these websites even existed. I hunted up the ramen site again
eventually, but I didn't think of the Bad Candy site or discover it too
still existed until I saw the horror that was Stripes.

Stripes is what they called the holiday-special
version of Hugs. I saw
them in a grocery store on my way back home on Thanksgiving, and while I
tried to explain what I had seen to a disbelieving and horrified friend,
inspiration struck: I wanted to create a site that would start to do for
candy what TWoP did for television.

TWoP is, of course, the major guiding light behind this site. They "recap"
various TV shows. It's more than a review, and it's more than the short
blurbs you can find all over the web that just "recap" the major plot
points of a given episode.

What the folks at TWoP do is watch each episode of a given show a couple
of times, and then give you the play-by-play - complete with snarky
comments about the show, this episode, the actors, often complete with
insights into what's really going on behind the scenes and why a real
person would never do what that contestant on Top Chef or that character
on Gilmore Girls just did. It's like watching the show with your
pop-culture-savvy best friend.

Their slogan used to be that they watched TV so you didn't have to,
because reading one of their 7-to-27-page recaps was like watching an
episode yourself, with that best friend. In fact, I used to get confused
about which episodes of House I had seen and which ones I had just read
about. I always wanted to write recaps of something, and I was spurred on
by a friend who used to show me things that Jacob (a recapper at TWoP) had
said and demand that I admit to having written them.

Even if I could pull off one of Jacob's double-digit recaps synthesizing
Doctor Who with Gnostic texts, I don't think you'd ever see it here.
Eating a piece of candy is necessarily a briefer experience than watching
an hourlong drama, so these recaps will rarely run to three pages. But
where many sites provide short reviews grading a ton of candies,
blog-style, here I hope you will find longer wilder pieces that share more
of the experience of eating candy. Sugar high and all.